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Recently, I closely and lovingly watched Emma, a beautiful seven-year-old Belgian draft mare, we saved from imminent slaughter at the New Holland Livestock Auction in Pennsylvania. Emma appeared to me to be living in a Garden of Eden of sorts right in my own backyard. I was struck by this idea: the way in which we humans are treating our animal kin is wrong and indecent.
In his concluding chapter of When Elephants Weep, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson proposes the revolutionary idea that we must share the world with our fellow creatures for we are all animals, although it is often convenient for us to forget this. In his last paragraph of his conclusion, he states this revelation:
When animals are no longer colonized and appropriated by us, we can reach out to our evolutionary cousins. Perhaps then the ancient hope for a deeper emotional connection across the species barrier, for closeness and participation in a realm of feelings now beyond our imagination, will be realized.
For such intelligent and creative beings, it has long amazed me how often we do not use our powers of imagination. The question is why? Why don’t we use our imaginations when it comes to considering the emotions of animals? We do with our pets; why not with all animals? Why does science so often tell us that animals don’t have emotions such as ours? How can we know if they can’t speak to us? Any pet owner knows in their heart that dogs experience emotions. They don’t have to speak to us, but we just know. Why should this be any different for animals selected for food, hunting, or laboratory experiments?
Masson quotes the scientist Douglas Chadwick:
If I learned anything from my time among the elephants, it is the extent to which we are kin. The warmth of their families makes me feel warm. Their capacity for delight gives me joy. Their ability to learn and understand things is a continuing revelation for me. If a person can’t see these qualities when looking at elephants, it can only be because he or she doesn’t want to.
We can extrapolate this sense of wonder to all animals. If we watch them closely, no matter the species, we perceive a set of communication and emotions. Simply because they can’t talk does not mean they can’t feel. If we use our gifts of imagination and compassion, can’t we possibly imagine right before a pig is slaughtered, the pig asking us, “Please don’t kill me. I want to live as much as you do.” If the hunter looked the deer in the eye and the deer could speak perhaps the deer would say, “Please don’t kill me, my children need me.” We can use our sense of wonder from childhood to believe they can speak.
As Masson asserts, “Such speech did not stop concentration camp inmates from being murdered during the holocaust; there, humans, it was said, were lice and rats.”
Let us remember how we felt as children when a guardian or relative read a book about our animal friends. We had the power of imagination and compassion then. We still have it today. We must practice using it.